St. Roch residents are determined to end the explosion of violence in their neighborhood

Not long ago, the Rev. Douglas Haywood -- a barber at Joe's Afro Hut in St. Roch -- stood next to his nephew at a funeral. He turned to the young man, deep into the world of drug deals and fast money, and asked, "Where do you want to be buried?"

Sure enough, months later, the family buried the nephew.

"As close as he was to me, I couldn't pull him out," said Haywood, his silver shears snipping as he talked. Still, he said he believes that most young men can be taught "a better way," he said.

Across fences in St. Roch and within barbershops and churches, neighbors debate how to halt the recent explosion of violence, which in most cases has been traced back to young men.

Troubles began to increase last year in St. Roch, which ended the year with four homicides.

But the first two killings last year were closer to the fringes of the neighborhood, on Elysian Fields and Almonaster avenues or near the railroad tracks that run along Florida Avenue.

Then in November, something seemed to change, after Rodney Coleman, 17, was shot to death at Music and Prieur streets, about a block from St. Roch Park. Since then, six more people have been killed, most near the heart of the neighborhood. Over the past few months, St. Roch and nearby neighborhoods have surpassed Central City as New Orleans' most violent section.

At St. Roch Park, the basketball court often sits empty these days. Instead, parents have pushed a portable net nearby, where children shoot hoops in the street.

Last week, as a group of youngsters bounced a ball on the asphalt, a sedan sped around the corner. "Watch for the car!" yelled June Winters, 25, his voice scattering the children.

The net sits on St. Roch Avenue at one edge of the lush, grassy expanse that takes up two city blocks. Three years ago, the space was still covered with white gravel and rows of FEMA trailers, and neighbors were vocal about getting their playground back. But now the Johnson Street edge of the park has become a part-time haven for drug activity and the epicenter of a rash of violence.

So parents prefer that their kids dodge traffic. "Nobody wants their child in that part of the park," Winters said.

At least one school moved its bus stop away from the park after Dennis was killed.

Fear like this is unprecedented in the park, a hub of the quiet, historic community. "It's sad. That was our park; we came up there," said Ronda Boutte, a day-care worker whose daughter was hit in the arm by a bullet after gunmen sprayed a family house.

Named for the St. Roch shrine and cemetery dedicated after the 1867 yellow-fever epidemic, the neighborhood has an irregular shape largely due to the railway tracks that spurred its development as an expansion of Faubourg Marigny. It's shaped like a tall watering can, with a narrow spout pointing toward City Park, a base on St. Claude Avenue where the shuttered St. Roch Market stands and a diagonal handle that follows Almonaster Avenue into Gentilly.

St. Roch has seen bloodshed before, but not like this. "It's never been this bad," said the Rev. Donald Jeanjacques, who's spent the past 27 years leading True Vine Baptist Church, four blocks from the park.

Over the past few months, the coroner's van has spent much of its time picking up bodies in St. Roch and nearby neighborhoods. "Looks like there's a shooting every other day, or every day," said Nelda Millon, 62, a retired municipal employee who's lived in St. Roch for 35 years. "This is rare, very rare. And it's frightening."

A concurrent rise in petty crime such as "smash-and-grabs" -- thefts through windows of parked cars -- has become common on Sunday mornings, prompting churches to station ushers outside.

Criminals have also been more brazen than ever before, acting in the light of day, said the Rev. Tony Ricard, from the Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church, which borders the park.

No one seems to know what prompted the outbreak.

"Something just flared up all at once," said Capt. Bernadine Kelly, commander of the New Orleans Police Department's 5th District, a sprawling geographic area that includes St. Roch.

'A common thread'

Neighbors say that their once-stable, working-class, mixed-race neighborhood has been weakened by blight, neglect and the loss of nearly half its population after Hurricane Katrina. And given the relative quiet in Central City, a previous ground zero for city violence, neighbors wonder whether St. Roch is merely the latest haunt of the city's nomadic drug trade and its accompanying violence, which Mayor Mitch Landrieu has called "a public health crisis."

The NOPD has said little about the recent burst of violence in St. Roch and their response to it. But now police brass say they're onto something.

At the end of February, all relevant police units met with an unnamed federal agency to look at cases and implement tactics that have now been in place for about two weeks, Deputy Chief Marlin Defillo said. Defillo said he couldn't reveal tactical details but called St. Roch "a top priority" and noted that new software will soon help police deploy officers to each area, based on crime patterns and calls for service.

Kelly, who grew up in the district and takes the recent string of murders "very seriously and very personally," said the department believes the killings are retaliatory and have "a common thread." She also ordered officers, when possible, to walk through St. Roch Park and to park there when they write incident reports.

Neighbors say they haven't seen a noticeable increase in patrols. But police can't shoulder all the blame, activist Reggie Lawson said. He and other longtime neighbors point to a familiar array of suspects: itinerant renters, schools in flux, dysfunctional families, untreated mental illness and the quick-money allure of the drug trade compared with the low-wage drudgery of the service industry.

Key storm-damaged structures also remain shuttered, including nearly 1,600 vacant apartments and homes, most of the area's schools and the historic, city-owned St. Roch Market, which has yet to be repaired even though former recovery czar Ed Blakely named it a top city priority in March 2007.

In the wake of the recent violence, some longtime residents also became introspective about their role in creating a healthy -- or unhealthy -- neighborhood.

St. Roch native August Collins Sr., 43, now heads youth advocacy for the Youth Empowerment Program in Central City, which works with at-risk teenagers. The son of a hospital switchboard operator, he grew up on a block that was nearly half-white, with solid working-class neighbors who were teachers, cooks and construction workers.

Collins, who still passes through St. Roch daily, noted a gradual decline in the businesses that hired young residents, he said. No Melba's Ice-Cream Parlor on Franklin Avenue. No Crump & Son churning out pig lips and hog cracklins at the corner of Painters and North Tonti streets, where Collins used to wash 100 pig-lip jars for a dollar. No more grocery stores.

"What's left is a lack of opportunity," Collins said.

Riddled with blight

After levee breaches poured between 6 and 13 feet of water into St. Roch, one of the first neighbors to return was Jackie DeSalle-Dixon, 54, a retired hotel supervisor.

Just a few months after Katrina, she was determined to rebuild both her pink corner house and her neighborhood. "I felt like if I had the courage to come back, I might influence somebody else," she said.

She recalled the joy she felt when the streetlight finally lit up her corner, at Music and Galvez streets. That light never goes off, day or night, she said, giving it a biblical quality among neighbors, who say it will keep burning until it has guided everyone home.

The city's nonprofit rebuilding agencies still maintain waiting lists of hundreds of homeowners, many of them elderly and low-income, who want to return. "There are still a lot who want to be here, but aren't," said Ricard, who still has many parishioners who drive in from Slidell, LaPlace, Gramercy and even farther, with hopes of eventually rebuilding.

Nelda Millon, the plucky ringleader of a large extended family, commuted from Houston for a year to fix up the double she shares with her older sister, Noela. That house became the base for two-dozen family members as they made their own returns.

But now Millon faces problems she can't solve, like blight in nearly every direction.

Like almost every neighbor, Millon expressed frustration over the park's New Orleans Recreation Department building, which six years after Katrina still sits moldering on the "violent side" of the park. Like the St. Roch Market, the NORD center is one of this year's top 100 recovery projects for the Landrieu administration, and most neighbors seem confident it will be completed on schedule.

For now, Andre Randolph and the park's other volunteer coaches clear away any unwanted crowds each night when they arrive. But, he said, sometimes the crowd doesn't move far: across Johnson is a block-long span of blighted structures and empty lots.

The city's code-enforcement office specifically targets blighted property within a five-block radius of parks, playgrounds and schools. But that's daunting in St. Roch, where 38 percent of housing units are vacant, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

The city is "trying to eat away" at a huge backlog of citations, dating back to January 2010, said Jeff Hebert, who handles blight for the Landrieu administration. Hebert hopes to be up to date by this fall, he said.

Despite the blight, Millon said, St. Roch has felt safe until recently because neighbors watch out for each other.

The two sisters, like their mother before them, are an unflagging evening presence on the Galvez Street porch, where they chat with the block's other longtime porch-sitters: Ms. Jackie, Ms. Irma and Ms. Marva.

The women are known to speak their minds to anyone who misbehaves within sight. But now, in fear of stray bullets, they all head inside when it turns dark.

Others don't wait for dark, Jeanjacques said. "Some of the elders won't leave their house at all now. They're just traumatized," he said.

Without the elderly sentries, there's an even greater need for stepped-up policing, said Ricard. "When Mama and Daddy are around, the children don't cut up as much," he said.

Glimmer of hope

"No matter what a young person is into, I have hope," youth advocate Collins said.

As a young man, Collins relied upon barber Joe Foster, 62, who runs the Afro Hut in the 1400 block of Franklin Avenue. "He was there for me. And a lot of cats," said Collins, who became a barber himself and worked his way through college.

At the other edge of St. Roch, Turner & Son mechanic Eli Welch, 65, has also spent much of his life encouraging wayward youth. Welch, a teacher and coach, knew one of the recently murdered young men, who was shot to death by a good friend. "They played around with each other every other day," he said, but they had a dispute and didn't know how to resolve it.

The tide could turn in St. Roch with some coordinated effort, Welch said, suggesting that some troubled youths might benefit from the sort of program he ran at Edward H. Phillips Jr. High. There, he taught them chronic truants skills, such as how to build an engine from scratch, and made sure they came to school.

Men still stop him on the street and thank him for the work he did decades ago, said Welch, who continues to reach out to kids in St. Roch, tracking not only their graduations and other milestones, but also their missteps.

Because of those relationships, he can be frank with young men whom others have written off, he said. He recalled a recent incident, when he had hailed down a young man whom he'd seen conducting a drug deal.

"I told this fellow, 'I've known you for a long time. So you'll understand when I tell you: not around me. Not around this neighborhood.'"